Busy Baking Bear

While Endon has been busy in the garden, Hanley and I have found other ways to help.  Hanley has been engineering on the model railway with Grizzly, while I had a baking day with Polar.

Polar makes bread using a sourdough yeast mix, which she started fermenting, from just rye flour and water, over a year ago.  She feeds it with extra flour and water every other day, so there is always some ready for bread-making, but stores it in the fridge or freezer when we go boating.  These loaves had been 'proving' in the fridge overnight.  We bears can't really help with bread-making, as we would get sticky paws or, even worse, get fur in the dough!

But we can make cakes, and I wanted to make one ready for Grizzly's birthday.  First, we lined the tin with grease-proof paper.

Then I checked that the fruit for the cake had soaked up all the whiskey Polar had put in the jug with it.  Since he was poorly last year, Grizzly isn't supposed to drink spirits, but he can enjoy the taste of whiskey in a fruit cake.

The next job was to weigh the sugar and the flour.  Polar uses some scales she decorated many years ago, when she and Grizzly lived in Hampshire.  Hanley Bear is proud to point out that they were made in Staffordshire - you can just see the little knot emblem in the middle of the balance.

My next job was to whisk the sugar and an egg together, then Polar carefully added some oil, with a little of the flour to stop the mixture 'curdling'. 

I carefully stirred in the rest of the flour and then the fruit.  I could smell the whiskey and started to feel slightly giddy!

Once we had spooned the mixture into the tin, Polar let me lick the spoon.  It tasted lovely, but I had to go and have a little nap after that, while everything was baking.

Last week, when we made marmalade, there was some orange pulp left over.  Polar doesn't like to waste things so, while I was mixing the whiskey cake, she mixed up some more basic cake mix, with sugar, egg, rapeseed oil and flour, and added the orange pulp to it, along with some ground nuts.  She put this into two small loaf tins to make two more cakes.

Here's how everything looked once it was cooked.  

Polar has frozen three of the loaves and one marmalade cake, for eating later, but we had fresh bread and some marmalade cake for tea, and we are looking forward to trying the whiskey cake on Grizzly's birthday, which is tomorrow!